"DNA evidence - The Ian Ashworth Effect"<p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Descent_from_Genghis_Khan#DNA_evidence_-_The_Ian_Ashworth_Effect" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Descent_from_Genghis_Khan#DNA_e...</a><p><i>Zerjal et al. [2003] [6] identified a Y-chromosomal lineage present in about 8% of the men in a large region of Asia (about 0.5% of the men in the world). The paper suggests that the pattern of variation within the lineage is consistent with a hypothesis that it originated in Mongolia about 1,000 years ago (thus several generations prior to the birth of Genghis). Such a spread would be too rapid to have occurred by genetic drift, and must therefore be the result of selection. The authors propose that the lineage is carried by likely male-line descendants of Genghis Khan and his close male relatives, and that it has spread through social selection. Both due to the power that Khan and his direct descendants held and a society which allowed one man to have many children through having multiple wives and widespread rape in conquered cities.[7]
According to Family Tree DNA, Genghis Khan is believed to have belonged to Haplogroup C3. </i><p>-- * --<p>The Genetic Legacy of the Mongols<p><a href="http://web.unife.it/progetti/genetica/Giorgio/PDFfiles/ajhg2003.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://web.unife.it/progetti/genetica/Giorgio/PDFfiles/ajhg2...</a>
This is not as surprising as it might seem, and in fact is more of a statistical trick than anything else— according to Wiki, the most recent common ancestor of all humans alive today is believed to have lived only 2~5,000 years ago.<p>Of course Genghis Khan was unusually prolific, and the direct patrilineal aspect is what makes it special, but you don't have to go far back in time to find an ancestor you share with one in ten people, let alone one in a hundred.
I wonder what the degree of relatedness (assuming inbreeding) these descendants actually have with Genghis Khan. We know that family trees break down into direct acyclic graphs over the longer term.<p>Note that the title assumes just patrilinear descent, so any man that may have had only daughters will not pass on the Y chromosome, though he will still have a non-patrilinear lineage (carried by both sons and daughters).<p>BTW, what are the main structural differences between strictly male and strictly female lineages?
It's worth noting here that this paper only looks at Kahn's direct descendants through the male line of Genghis Kahn. I believe that the number of people alive who are in any way related Genghis Kahn (through both matrilineal and patrilineal lines) is a lot higher than 1 in 200.
Douglas Adams had something to say about this.<p>"Mr L Prosser was, as they say, only human. In other words he was a carbon-based life form descended from an ape. More specifically he was forty, fat and shabby and worked for the local council. Curiously enough, though he didn't know it, he was also a direct male-line descendant of Genghis Khan, though intervening generations and racial mixing had so juggled his genes that he had no discernible Mongoloid characteristics, and the only vestiges left in Mr L Prosser of his mighty ancestry were a pronounced stoutness about the tum and a predilection for little fur hats.<p>"...Mr Prosser's mouth opened and closed a couple of times while his mind was for a moment filled with inexplicable but terribly attractive visions of Arthur Dent's house being consumed with fire and Arthur himself running screaming from the blazing ruin with at least three hefty spears protruding from his back. Mr Prosser was often bothered with visions like these and they made him feel very nervous. He stuttered for a moment and then pulled himself together.<p>"...He saw the bulldozer driver's union representative approaching and let his head sink back and closed his eyes. He was trying to marshal his arguments for proving that he did not now constitute a mental health hazard himself. He was far from certain about this - his mind seemed to be full of noise, horses, smoke, and the stench of blood. This always happened when he felt miserable and put upon, and he had never been able to explain it to himself. In a high dimension of which we know nothing the mighty Khan bellowed with rage, but Mr Prosser only trembled slightly and whimpered. He began to fell little pricks of water behind the eyelids. Bureaucratic cock-ups, angry men lying in the mud, indecipherable strangers handing out inexplicable humiliations and an unidentified army of horsemen laughing at him in his head - what a day."<p>(Hitchhikers chapter 1)
What is really annoying about articles like these is that they don't actually tell you the Y-DNA haplotypes or SNPs in the phylogenic graph. Even if it isn't cluttering up the main article it would be great to have as footnote information for those of us who actually know our Y-DNA information.<p>Sure enough, by clicking through and getting to the real journal article, this is the footnote that accompanies the graph which is duplicated in the Discover article:<p><pre><code> Figure 1 - Median-joining network (Bandelt et al. 1999)
representing Y-chromosomal variation within haplogroup C*
(xC3c). Chromosomes were typed with a minimum of 16 binary
markers (Qamar et al. 2002; Zerjal et al. 2002; our
unpublished observations), including RPS4Y and M48, to
define the lineage C*(xC3c) (Y-Chromosome-Consortium 2002),
also known as haplogroup 10, derived for RPS4Y and
ancestral for M48. Sixteen Y microsatellites were also
typed, but DYS19 was excluded from the network analysis
because it is duplicated in haplogroup C. The central star-
cluster profile is 10-16-25-10-11-13-14-12-11-11-11-12-8-10-
10, for the loci DYS389I-DYS389b-DYS390-DYS391-DYS392-
DYS393-DYS388-DYS425-DYS426-DYS434-DYS435-DYS436-DYS437-
DYS438-DYS439. Circles represent lineages, area is
proportional to frequency, and color indicates population
of origin. Lines represent microsatellite mutational
differences.
</code></pre>
If you are interested in DNA and haven't tested your own Y/mt-DNA, I highly recommend getting it tested (e.g. FamilyTreeDNA) and finding out a little bit more about yourself.
I've recently read that about every second western european male is somehow a descendant of the egyptian pharaoh Tutenchamun. I actually lived right next to the labs of a company where you can get yourself tested for that specific gene (and all other sorts of DNA related tests).<p>I guess then it is not too uncommon to have some genetic relation to any kind of people if they've lived many hundreds of years ago.
Also, I remember someone doing "math" on how many women Genghis Khan had to sleep with everyday his life to reach the number he did (it was like 2,000 women wasn't it?) compared to his lifetime... I remember the number being pretty ridiculous.
The ideal lifestyle if life was perfect would be that of Genghis Khan. There'd be no use for religion, spirituality, philosophy, etc. All of philosophy stems from "I can't have everything that I want, so...". But if you can have everything you want: endless supply of women.. then life is all grand. You conquer, You win, You build, you get endless orgasms. No need to master your emotions and deal with unfairness.